TODF: welcome to the cathode void

TODF was a UHF station that played in the Waterloo IA area when I was a kid. I can't find any information on it on the internet, so I'm writing down what I can remember of it here. Get in touch if you remember this!

Sunday, September 11, 2011

So with Dana and I hard at work on our general weird-ass weblog The Brooklyn Cult of Mystic Horrors, I've decided to refocus this here travesty into a 100% Made For TV Horror blog. You heard right! Nothing but fuzzed-out VHS copies of ABC Movie Of The Week classics from here until time ends! Never-run pilot episodes! Ruminations on The Sixth Sense! An endless slew of haunted houses, possessed children and suburban cultists! As a tease of what's coming up:

Friday, September 2, 2011

So I left California and moved to New York. Trust me, it makes even less sense to me. Anyway, the good news is I appear to be in a productive mood again: the MPA album I Am An Empty House Longing To Be Haunted is completed and being pressed, I've started work on my contemporary cosmic freakout novelization Suffer A Witch To Live, and I might even get back to doing reviews. There's a couple new areas as far as that goes: the Video Nasty Project, in which I watch every film on the Video Nasty list and consider the reasons such films were lumped together, and the newly expanded Occult Pornography of the Seventies, for which I've done a lot more "research" on the crossroads between porn at its highest level of public credibility, the resurgence of the occult in the early seventies, and what I can only call psychosisploitation (Multiple Personality Disorder, fugue states, possession). I had a pretty long dry spell in Oakland but I was still watching a ton of movies, and I think what I'll do at least to start is work up three sentence synopses of what I've been watching and expand from there. I will most likely be working with Dana on some of this stuff. More soon! I miss you!

Monday, February 28, 2011

Let me begin by saying this about The Van: The song Chevy Van plays at least three times during the film. Maybe more! I lost count! In fact, it was re-released as Chevy Van despite the fact that the van in question is in fact a Dodge. Do not let this kind of inconsistency fool you, because this isn't that kind of movie. This is, instead, a coming-of-age story, which works along the tried and true premise that a boy who saves his money and works like a dog will eventually impress girls once he buys a pornographically ridiculous custom van called the Straight Arrow (just so you know, fellas, the humpwagon only stops for the ladies) with all kinds of erotic artifacts that the ladies love, like a toaster. As you may expect, Bobby's seemingly foolproof plan of asking the honeys if they wanna smoke a joint in the back of his shaggin' wagon do not go according to plan. This is primarily because, as you may have expected, Bobby is something of a dufus. It's worth noting that Stuart Goetz, who played Bobby, didn't have much of a career as an actor but is busily employed as a music editor for shows like One Tree Hill, The West Wing and the original GI Joe cartoon series. (more soon)

Sunday, February 13, 2011

You may ask yourself (go ahead, I'll allow it) why it is I have been so remiss in my reviewery and other public service. The reason, as some of you may know by now, is because I'm making a movie, or more properly a VOD-style series, titled (you guessed it) The Theater of Diminished Faculties. I've had to explain this project to a number of people without the sort of shared references we have, so it'll be much easier to explain here. The series is a framed narrative, in the sense of The Illustrated Man, and is oriented toward a kind of 70's ABC Movie Of The Week/Night Gallery/Tales Of The Unexpected kind of vibe, with some of the nested stories playing up more of the lurid giallo-as-psychedelic-soap-opera/perverts from beyond the grave angles you might wisely expect. My strategy is to make the "edited American versions" of the episodes available for viewing online, while selling a deluxe "unedited/expanded" handmade dvd edition (including a copy of my book And So On For Ever, available in part at Cryptonarrative and copies of the soundtrack by my band MPA titled I Am An Empty House Longing To Be Haunted, and a couple dvd-only extras such as the complete Suffer A Witch To Live and The Butterfly Labyrinth Of The Black-Thighed Witch: A Sex Tragedy And Cautionary Tale episodes) for the otaku market. I've been working on getting the scripts ready, rounding up actors, working on puppet designs and scouting locations and hope to begin shooting next month with a "trial run" on a trailer/video for the song The Ghost Of Dried Wells in New York. I plan to do larger shoots in New York, Austin TX and Oakland CA, while doing smaller pickup shots across the country as part of my ill-advised summer tour. After the trailer is shot we'll be doing some fundraising, and I'll have some short-run items available for sale (including a TODF tshirt and hopefully an ep by Clocksucker, the band April and I are working on) and I'll be doing the long-promised Dr. Cocktopus Go-Go Red Hot Action Telethon that'll make the Jerry Lewis telethon look like The Day The Clown Died. Note that's not a one-story-per-episode deal, but jumping between stories, like The Saragossa Manuscript or Arrebato, tho I hope it's clear I'm not trying to do some kinda ridiculous autistic recreation of earlier films or periods of time as is the case with certain contemporary directors I will not sully your ears with at this time. To that end, hardcore gorehounds are gonna hate it: the whole thing is a very baroque theatrical approach, like Gradiva or Eugenie De Sade or a bit like I Drink Your Blood, but the best quick example of the *heavy* stuff I can give is the prologue from Coppola's Dracula, that kind of operatic bombast, despite my inability to resist disclaimers and hucksterism (as heard clearly on the radio trailer). More info (and the usual reviews) coming soon!

Sunday, November 28, 2010

After a pretty heavy month I'm up for goofing off, and there's no better opportunity than NASCHYFEST, a week-long tribute to the favorite of the conoisseur of style and panache, Paul Naschy. I'm working on a proper review of Exorcism for Mondo Euro (which has already been cracking on Nashynalia all month), a couple more goofball reviews here, and possibly a very special episode of Discomancer as my tribute to the wolf king. I think right now is a good time for me to go whole hog on stuff like this as I'm definitely in that mode. Naschyfest shall be FOREVER!